Caffeine gives athletes an edge
By Katherine Hobson, NPR
After winning the Tour de France last month, Vincenzo Nibali was tested for a bunch of performance-enhancing substances. But Nibali and his fellow competitors were welcome to have several cups of coffee (or cans of Red Bull), before their ride into Paris; caffeine is not on the World Anti-Doping Agency’s banned list.
Still, the drug is definitely a performance booster. Just in the past few months, studies have shown that caffeine helps female volleyball players hit the ball harder and jump higher, rowers go farther, and cyclists go fasterin a 20K time trial.
A large body of research shows caffeine helps in “pretty much every kind of endurance exercise,” giving a performance advantage of 1.5 percent to 5 percent, says Mark Gleister, an exercise physiologist at St. Mary’s University in Twickenham, U.K., and an author of the recent cycling study.
“Of all the legal supplements an athlete could take, it has the biggest effect on performance,” he says. It’s not clear why, but the suspicion is that caffeine increases the frequency or size of neural transmissions and suppresses pain, he says. It’s not clear that it speeds very short sprints — Glaister is studying that — but it can help in any burst of activity that lasts longer than about a minute, he says.
Athletes see a benefit with a dose of between 3 to 6 mg. per kg. of body weight, which means that if a 140 pound cyclist were drinking an average cup of coffee, he’d get a lift after drinking about two to four cups.
73 year old guys get an edge from it as well. Wakes us up, and get the juices flowing. Performance enhancement among the geriatrics.
Duh.
Look and you’ll find studies going very deep into this. Great for endurance folks as it is well known to aid in metabolizing fat for energy. Pure caffeine more effective than coffee due to many other things in coffee, and less likely to induce the gottapee syndrome on long events, etc., etc.
I wonder if anyone tried banning caffeine from competition, and how many steps they took before being ambushed by coffee drinkers!
DougM: there use to be a limit on caffeine in the system for cyclist.
This is from WADA’s (World Anti Doping Agency) website on the subject.
“The status of caffeine has not changed from last year. Caffeine was removed from the Prohibited List in 2004. Its use in sport is not prohibited.
Caffeine is part of WADA’s Monitoring Program. This program includes substances which are not prohibited in sport, but which WADA monitors in order to detect patterns of misuse in sport.
The 2010 and 2011 Monitoring Programs did not reveal global specific patterns of misuse of caffeine in sport, though a significant increase in consumption in the athletic population is observed.”
Rick